This invention relates to systems and methods for transporting, processing, storing and displaying data and information such as that associated with electronic programming guides and Electronic Programming Guide (EPG) information and Event Information Table (EIT) information in a television system context.
Advances in technology continue to create a wide variety of services and programs offered to users via television and other video equipment. Such content may be disseminated via various media including cable, satellite, broadcast, and terrestrial systems such as LMDS and MMDS. Such content may include (1) traditional broadcast and cable television programs, (2) video services, such as pay-per-view (PPV), near video-on-demand, promo channels, electronic programming guides, and localized or specially formatted information, (3) cable delivered pc-based content and services, and (4) interactive services.
A variety of devices may be used to interface to service a content delivery media, such as, for example, a set top box (STB) connected to a user""s TV set. For purposes of this document, the term STB is used to refer to any and all such interface devices. Typically, today""s STB capabilities include receiving signals from the media, providing content in a number of channels and causing the subscribers"" TV set to display the selected channel.
Today, users can view programming or service information (SI) for near term services and program contents. However, a user may wish to determine which programs or contents are available for a future period, for example, a summary for seven days in the future. At this time, SI contains only a limited amount of information regarding future programming.
Currently, a user scrolls, for example, an electronic programming guide (EPG) for a display of available programming. The STB has to tune away from the current program, access requested data, obtain the requested information and display that information on the user""s TV set. A user may wait anywhere from 3-20 seconds during this process. To return to the user""s originally viewed channel, the STB reverses these steps while the user waits to return to the original program.
It would be advantageous to provide users with event information conveniently in real time for a longer period such as, up to one week in the future. Conventional arrangements do not provide this capability. For large or multiple networks, the event information table (EIT) and SI information constitutes an amount of data so great that the STB cannot store all the data effectively for multiple days, for all networks and transports, compressed or uncompressed. Further, the latency caused by breaking large files into smaller files with some duplicate data is not effective.
Consequently, a need exists for systems and methods for efficiently providing information such as EIT and EPG information corresponding to longer periods of time.